The Pleasures of Making Your Own Pork Patty

In 1973, three years before she traveled from Iran to Mecca for her hajj, my grandmother Parvin took another momentous journey. While visiting my uncle at college in Madison, Wis., she made a pilgrimage to the Oscar Mayer factory to demonstrate her devotion to her favorite food: hot dogs.

Even though the tour predictably left her revolted, it didn’t dampen her passion for wieners. Visiting us in California throughout my childhood, she would incessantly harass my mom to take her out for hot dogs, unwilling to board her return flight to Tehran until she’d eaten them at least a dozen times. To this day, she’ll eat a dog with great relish and say immediately afterward, “Well, that was a piece of junk.”

My grandmother passed down her conflicted feelings about sausage consumption to my mom. Ours was a pork-free household. The rules were arbitrary but strict: No pork in the house, ever. Except for the occasional pepperoni pizza. Or maybe Hawaiian.

At home, Mom served us turkey breakfast links that she got at the health-food store. But whenever we went out for breakfast, she let my brothers and me order pork sausages (though, inexplicably, not bacon). Distrustful of imitation syrup, she always smuggled in a little jug of the real stuff in her purse, and I lived in anticipation of the moment the syrup flowed onto the savory side of my plate. The sausage absorbed the sweet, aromatic maple only to release an array of new flavor combinations — vanilla with coriander, maple with black pepper. It was intoxicating.

But I inherited this matrilineal porcine anxiety. Recalling my grandmother’s vivid (and somehow increasingly disgusting) annual descriptions of the sausage factory, I had a hard time enjoying hot dogs — I occasionally still do. But ever in search of the heavenly commingling of pork, sage and maple syrup, I have never been able to resist ordering a side of breakfast sausage. I didn’t eat pork in any other form until I started cooking professionally in a kitchen where the reigning sense was taste. Our mantra was “Stir, taste, adjust.” If I didn’t taste, I couldn’t adjust.

I’d never been religious, but I’d always obeyed my elders. My decision to become an omnivore was fraught, not because it was a religious transgression but because it was my first act of self-assertion as a young adult. Nevertheless, looking down at my arms, elbow-deep in a massive bowl of ground pork and fat the first time I was assigned to make sausage at work, I silently, half-seriously asked my Muslim ancestors to forgive me.

Then I committed myself. The chef who took me under his wing was obsessed with charcuterie, so I learned the lingo, acquired the paraphernalia and memorized the ideal proportions of salt to lean to fat. I loved making pasta with clams and bits of fennel sausage I’d ground myself. I took pleasure in stuffing sausages into delicate casings, wrapping them into elegant coils, then skewering them on rosemary branches to grill alongside quail. I spent years perfecting the balance of maple, sage and black pepper to satisfy my enduring craving for breakfast links.

Eventually I left restaurants. I returned to my tiny home kitchen, where the mere thought of setting up a meat grinder or sausage stuffer was enough to turn me vegetarian. Finding and preparing casings, chilling and grinding the meat, stuffing and linking the sausages and then poking out air bubbles — the process is far too elaborate to undertake at home. But I’ll never be satisfied with store-bought sausages either — they never taste right.

I soon realized I could just ditch all the steps involving grinding and casings. As most of my favorite uses for sausage involve removing the casing and crumbling the meat or pressing it into patties, I focused on the most important part of the process — getting the taste and texture of the sausage mixture just right. It’s simple enough — just master three variables, and you’ll find you can vary the meats and flavorings endlessly to come up with any combinations you like.

First, use enough fat. In sausage, fat is a source of both delightfully porky flavor and a springy texture. Without enough fat, sausage will be dry and tasteless. Much to the horror of the artisanal charcutiers in my life, I don’t bother with grinding my own meat anymore. You don’t need to, either. Just find a good butcher or grocery-store meat counter. Ask how much fat they add to their ground pork. Twenty percent by weight is a good ratio, though 25 doesn’t hurt. If the ground pork available to you is too lean, ask the butcher to replace two ounces or so of the lean meat with ground pork belly or bacon.

Next, keep the meat cold. Add in the seasonings, and use your hands to work everything together quickly and efficiently. When the discrete ingredients have come together into a unified mixture that’s tacky enough to stick to your palm, the sausage is ready. It’ll now hold together as it cooks, forming a light patty instead of breaking up into crumbly bits.

Finally, taste and adjust. Fry up a tablespoon of the mixture, and taste thoughtfully. Is there enough salt? What about the other seasonings? Adjust anything that needs adjusting, and then make another test patty. When you’re sure all the seasonings are in balance, form the patties, and cook them off.

The process is so swift that you can reasonably get fresh breakfast sausages on the table, maple syrup and all, in the time it takes to bake a frittata or make a stack of pancakes. Get comfortable with the basics, then vary your seasonings and meats (though if you use chicken or turkey, increase the fat to 30 percent because those meats are naturally lean).

Lately I’ve grown lazy and started frying my sausage patties in a cast-iron pan alongside eggs fried in toast. As the maple-and-sage-tinged fat renders out of the sausage, the bread thirstily absorbs it. Sometimes I’ll even drizzle a tiny bit more syrup over the whole thing before I sit down to eat, dipping each bite of sausage into the runny yolk.

My grandmother recently moved to California, and I owe her a visit. I don’t think she has ever tasted homemade sausage, and I’m curious to hear what she thinks of mine. Maybe after she sees how it’s made, she’ll have a new story to tell. But probably not.